Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Arthur is standing over the slate sink when she comes in, scrubbing at a burn on one of the pots, and when he sees her he tries to hide it, but she puts a hand on his arm and makes him turn round. It’s strange to find him at such a domestic task, and for a beat she stares at him as if she hasn’t seen him for months. Indoors, without his cap, the red line where he pulls it over his eyes seems to divide his face in two. Below, he’s tanned an angry red from the summer sun; above, his forehead is an almost sickly white. It’s as if the blood has settled below his brows, like a pint that hasn’t been topped up.

“What is it?” He smiles, and she reaches up and smoothes down a wisp of white hair sticking up on his crown.

“Where’s Jim?” she asks.

“Turned in.”

“I’m pregnant,” she says simply, and she sees his smile wither. He lifts his hand to her, red and dripping from the sink. His own people, she recalls, bracing herself, but then her father seems to stay his hand. In his eyes she can see her guilt and shame, reflected as fury, yet still he holds back, even as his hand seems bound to leap forward and strike her. It’s the innocence of the child, she thinks. He would strike her, but not the child. She’s guilty, but not the child. She is composed of nothing but shame and this tiny core of growing innocence. The baby suddenly seems more like herself than herself. It’s as if she will give birth to herself and slough off this older, failed version. She feels fiercely defensive, willing to do anything to protect it.

So when Arthur asks, “Who?” she tells him, “Rhys,” and watches him lower his arm with a sigh. “I knew it,” he says, and she realizes in a rush— of course! — that Rhys would never have proposed to her if he hadn’t already asked her father’s permission. And Arthur must have given it, she thinks, as if it were back pay for the months of cheap labor, even though he knew how she felt about Rhys, even though he thought the boy a fool himself. It feels to her like a kind of betrayal, a rejection — perhaps he always meant to apply for work underground, hoped to get shot of the flock and her in one fell swoop — and it hardens her in her lie. It’s an ill wind, she thinks defiantly. His words.

But just when she thinks she’s escaped the blow, Arthur tells her, “You’d best go along and let her know, eh?” Esther must look confused, because he adds, softly, “His mam.” She balks then, but he nods his head. “It’ll be a consolation to her, I’d say. And maybe not such a surprise, neither. She knows he was sweet on you.”

She hasn’t thought it out; the name came to her so unbidden. It seemed so neat a moment before, so perfect, a way to keep her secret and the baby, a lie between Arthur and her, but now it’s starting to seem messy. And yet how to take it back?

“I can’t tell her,” she stammers. “I’d be too ashamed.”

“Might have considered that before,” he says, though not unkindly. “I’m sure she’ll keep it quiet if you ask her — not that that’ll be possible for long; it’ll get harder before it gets easier — but you should tell her. It’ll make the world of difference.”

And so she goes, telling herself it is a kindness. Rhys has already become such a memory for them all, such a fiction, really, like a character in a book, it’s not hard to imagine these extra pages for him. What does it matter, anyway, who the father is? She could wait until the morning, tired as she is, but she knows she’ll never sleep for thinking about it.

Outside, she heads to the barn and fetches the bike. When she comes out, she finds Jim perched on the top bar of the gate, like a bird on a telegraph wire.

“You’re supposed to be in bed.”

“How’d it get in there?” he hisses. “Was it really Rhys?” All she can do is swallow and nod, but when she looks up, what she sees on his face isn’t doubt, but jealousy.

Rhys is hers now.

“You’ll marry him if he comes back?”

She leans the bike against her side, nods again, stiffly, feeling as if her head is a stone that might tumble off her shoulders if she moves too much. Arthur hadn’t asked the question — unable to utter that “if” to her face — but she knows it’s the unspoken assumption. The very end of the happy ending.

“Because you love him,” Jim says, as if explaining it to himself. “And he loves you.”

“Yes?” she tells him. “Yes.”

He purses his lips. “But what if he doesn’t come back?”

She gives a little strangled yelp, shocked despite herself — Jim has clung so tenaciously to the possibility of Rhys’s survival, only to give up so easily now that he thinks Rhys hers — and then shocked at her own shock, at her instinctive duplicity. She puts her face in her hands to cover her confusion, and after a moment she feels him stroke her back.

“It’s all right,” he says gently. “If it’s a boy, you could call it Rhys.”

Her sobs have convinced him, satisfied him somehow, yet in the midst of her relief she wonders where they’ve come from. She wouldn’t have thought she could cry for Rhys if she’d had to. Doesn’t think herself such an actress, no matter what Mary might reckon. Will lies just spring from her unbidden now? she wonders. Is she embarked on a succession of them, a lifetime of them? Because yes, if it’s a boy, she will have to name it Rhys, and every day of it’s life she’ll call it Rhys, Rhys, Rhys. She can feel the sobs coming again, but when Jim reaches his arm around her, pressing close, she jerks away.

“You should go to bed,” she tells him, and he glares at her as if to say, Make me. In the moonlight she notices a faint down silvering his upper lip. But then he sticks his tongue out and runs inside.

The war will be over soon, she thinks, looking after him, and he’ll be gone too. His mother, Esther knows, has written to him recently to say she was finding a new place for them — no mention of “Uncle” Ted — and that she’d send for him soon.

It comes to her that Colin was a boy once, and perhaps that’s why, when she thinks of him now, she feels, for the first time, nothing. Not fear. Not hatred. He’s done his worst, to be sure, but his worst seems suddenly so much less than her own.

She straddles the bike, points it down the lane, and coasts through the dark village.

WAKING IN THE INFIRMARY, staring at his leg suspended above him, glowing palely in it’s plaster, Karsten wonders fleetingly if he’s turning into the invisible man. He can’t see his leg, though he knows it’s there under the cast, itching fiercely, fragile as glass.

He’d been wary of the interrogator, his excellent German, so much more polished than that of the camp translator, a former lecturer in German literature who spoke an oddly accented brand of High German full of “thee”s and “thou”s, and whom the men called Charlemagne. Rotheram, the captain introduced himself as. He was in his late twenties, Karsten judged, no more than ten years older than him, yet he looked drawn, tired. When he leaned back to run a hand through his hair, he winced, clutched his side, rubbing at some ache, some old wound. His haggard look emboldened Karsten; the man seemed too exhausted to have his wits about him. He offered Karsten tea, and Karsten took it, careful not to let his hands shake. It shocked him that he’d looked forward, back in Dover, to interrogation, as a chance to prove something. But he’d had no secrets then. When Rotheram started by saying “You surrendered, I see,” Karsten was actually relieved, not insulted.

The captain produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, held it out. “That must have been hard. Would you like to talk about it?”